Wednesday, 22 May 2013

Following the new Skinflick release that we highlighted a few weeks back, here's another brand new release that we here at Turquoise Coal would like to draw your attention to.

Mank is the ambient electronic project of Ben Powell, based in North Wales.
Ben
has been recording as Mank since 1998 releasing “home made” CDs on his
Mankymusic label. Influenced by nature and maths the music is computer
based, combining field recordings with real and virtual instruments. Ben
is known for using some exclusive recording locations - two releases
(Isbjorn and Ambergris) were recorded whilst on board a Russian polar
research ship at the north pole, most of the Mank albums were born at
sea.

Ben says "The majority of this album was
written on a Canadian icebreaker on the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska -
for my day job I work on ships making oceanographic measurements and as
such I spend a lot of time bobbing around at sea near the North Pole.
Making music lets me escape to my own world away from the ship but I
hope that the beauty of the location comes through in my music, there
are a lot of field recordings embedded in the mix."

The full 53'49" album is available free from Ben's SoundCloud site here and comes highly recommended to all fans of Arctic electronica!

We hope to unearth lost, forgotten or obscure music from the north Wales music scene of the past few decades and make it available again, or in many cases, for the first time.

Much of the music here has never seen an official release, and the stuff that has is all currently out of print as far as we know. Wherever possible, at least one member of the respective band has given permission for their music to be uploaded, but if anyone else has a claim to the copyright of anything here that they object to being shared, please get in touch with us and we will remove it.

All downloads are encoded as 320 kbs mp3s, providing as reasonably good quality sound as can be expected in the circumstances.